Special Thanksgiving Report

Hey there, hope everybody had a good Thanksgiving eating and family/friending it up.  I thought it would be interesting to dissect how to feed 1,000 ravenous cold-weather workers on an entirely food-based holiday.  We barely even have football to distract us here (18-hour time delay plus rebroadcasting), and in order to fit everyone in the galley at some point, people sign up for one of three meal times—meaning they are extra crazily starved, waiting all the way from breakfast to 3, 5, or 7pm for their big meal.

Despite some impulsive actions and questionable life choices, I think it’s safe to say I’m on the rational end of the thought spectrum.  I like to plan.  And more importantly, I tend to base my planning on reality: facts, informed opinions and estimations, whatever evaluative bits are at hand.  It’s also helpful to build flexibility into one’s plans, of course.  You always need to react and adjust to what actually happens versus how you imagined it would go, as well as keep something in your pocket for the unexpected, like a foreign invasion for instance.

I’m going to try to be diplomatic, both to exercise a positive attitude and on the off chance someone reading this wants to fire me.  Maybe our bosses’ own optimism and/or faith in our skill led them to not even decide a menu until a week ago; not specify what they wanted for those dishes; not assign prep to any particular team or person; not decide to start cutting the 60 turkeys in half until two days before; underestimate the amount needed of every side dish by a factor of at least three; and only truly realize the deep deep shit they walked us into during the first of three giant feast seatings.

Picture six people standing in a row, each with a cutting board, each with a sack of potatoes.  Now picture two more such set-ups across the table.  (If you’re keeping score, that’s eight people times 25 pounds per sack, about five sacks each, for 1,000 pounds—about 2.5 times what we prepped before Thanksgiving.  Roughly 1,000 pounds of potatoes were consumed, which is not that crazy for 1,000 people when you think about it.  Key takeaway: THINK ABOUT IT, JUST FOR ONE MINUTE, AND YOU’D KNOW 500 POUNDS OF POTATOES IS [CENSORED FOR OBSCENITY], ahem, not enough FOR 1,000 PEOPLE.)  Before and after the potato brigade, we peeled and cut a couple hundred pounds of carrots and sweet potatoes.  These were immediately cooked and served.  If only some of those fun times had been had the previous day, when I fumed over the asinine process of blanching, icing, draining, and later toweling off root veggies so that the oil could more closely cling to them previous to their roasting.  Now, we were able to cut down the roasting time from 30 to 10 minutes, all with a mere five hours of unnecessary and infuriating prep, which all went out the window when we just roasted the additional 300% more of them for 30 minutes in a mad frenzy day-of.

Thank you for letting me get that off my chest.  The pies, thankfully, were amazing—the bakery folks made all the crusts from scratch with actual butter, and I enjoyed some fantastic pecan pie and cranberry cheesecake.  Let’s all just remember dessert, and that we got a free glass of wine, and that we will not let this happen again.